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Trans-Scripts 1 (2011)
The Genealogical Scheme: Race or Culture?
Étienne Balibar 
I am honoured to have been asked to contribute, together with my long time friend and
colleague David Theo Goldberg, a presentation for the launching ceremony of the new
online journal Trans-scripts, created by students from the Schools of Humanities and the
Social Sciences in this University. I am very pleased to do it, and I want first to
congratulate them for this brilliant initiative. I am sure it will bring a whole range of new
possibilities for inventing, reflecting, and exchanging both among the students
themselves and between them and with the more seasoned scholars like us who need
fresh air and fresh challenges, across campus and in relation with other Universities. I
wish the journal a long and fruitful activity.
Given that the topic of the Journal’s inaugural issue is “Race: Theories, Identities,
Intersections, Histories, and the ‘Post-Racial’ Society,” I thought that I could seize this
occasion to summarize some working hypotheses to which I was led in the course of
revising, and rectifying, what I had proposed in earlier essays concerning the relationship
between nationalism and racism in modern societies, at a time when the discussion was
more about the emergence of a “new racism” (also sometimes labelled “cultural racism,”
or even “racism without races”) than about the “post-racial society” (which is sometimes
identified with, sometimes distinguished from so-called “multiculturalism”). Indeed, the
very articulation of all these terms is at stake, more than ever, in our discussions. They
have an immediate political import, but they also call for a broader historical and
discursive analysis, which was my second reason to assemble my remarks around the
category of the genealogical scheme, thus trying to connect from a different angle with the
question on which I teach my class this year in Critical Theory Emphasis, namely
“bourgeois universality and anthropological differences.”
I will organize my presentation in two parts, of unequal length, but trying to keep a
certain balance of the diverse perspectives with which I am now working. I will start
with relatively quick self referential indications concerning the notion of the “fictitious

Étienne Balibar is Distinguished Professor of French & Italian and Distinguished Professor of
Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine and Professor Emeritus of Political
and Moral Philosophy at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. His works include Race, Nation, and
Class, with Immanuel Wallerstein (1991), Politics and the Other Scene (2002), and We, the People of
Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2004).
This paper was presented at the Launching Ceremony of Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Journal in
the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine, February 16th, 2011.
Étienne Balibar
ethnicity” that I had been proposing earlier, and the use that some more recent scholars
have made of it, then I will summarily discuss some “discursive models” of the
genealogical scheme that I believe to be able to borrow from philosophy, literature,
anthropology, and history, which hopefully will allow me in the end to add some
remarks about the political relevance of this idea.
Racism, nationalism, and “fictitious ethnicity”
In a book called Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities, that I wrote in collaboration with
Immanuel Wallerstein (each of us contributing his own chapters), published in French
and then in English in 1988/1991, and in some later essays, I had embarked on analyses
of what I considered, in a broad sense, to form the preliminaries of an “anthropology of
the nation form” in modern times, involving at the same time a description of the model
of subjectivity that could be called homo nationalis, and a reflection on the great
institutional “equation” which governs the political in modern times: that of nationality
and citizenship, providing the construction of subjects with a condition at the same time
inevitable and unstable, not to say contradictory, or inevitably challenged and disrupted
historically from the inside. This was supposed, in particular, to help us understand how,
in the wake of the constitution of “nations” in the bourgeois sense (through “revolutions,”
“unities,” and “independences” of different kinds involving a “popular” participation
and consent), a certain community-effect was produced and maintained, where racism was
not a contingent addition, but rather a necessary “internal supplement.” This was not a
way of simply identifying racism and nationalism, or even to pretend that, in any
conjuncture, among any political “camps” in bourgeois society, rampant or aggressive
racism would inevitably follow from nationalism, but rather of explaining why, when the
nation-form becomes challenged and undergoes a crisis (which happens throughout its
history), the development of racist ideologies and practices appears as a natural
“solution” (solution which, indeed, essentially aggravates the crisis), not only at an
intellectual or strategic level controlled by the state, but also at a popular and social level.
In this perspective I coined the notions of “fictitious ethnicity” (which I defined as the
transformation of the idea, or the ideal of the nation into a representation of “natural”
community based either on race, or language, or both), and “generational connection”
(suggesting in particular that the nation must find a mechanism, both institutional and
imaginary, to transfer and reproduce at the political level the symbolic function that
binds successive generations with one another, carrying identities and norms) (Balibar
and Wallerstein, chapters 3 and 5; Balibar, We, the People of Europe? chapter 2). These ideas
were invoked then, with qualifications and critical transformations, by several scholars, in
particular feminist philosophers and anthropologists, working on the notion of
reproduction by taking into account (and pitting against one another) both the socioeconomic meaning and the biopolitical meaning of the term. This was particularly the
case with Alys Eve Weinbaum in the U.S. and Rada Ivekovic in Europe. Weinbaum in
her book Wayward Reproductions would emphasize that the “fictitious ethnicity” of the
nation is in fact a genealogical or quasi-genealogical order, and that, within such an
order, relationships of domination based on “race” and “gender” are mutual
prerequisites (Weinbaum). Ivekovic in her book Le sexe de la nation (i.e. The Nation’s
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Gender, or even The Nation’s Sex) would quote my phrase: “It is an essential aspect in
nations that they configure time through instituting the connection of generations…,” 1 but
then she would add: the connection of generations is inevitably mediated by the
biopolitical processes of the reproduction of the human, or the species; and therefore,
when the nation materially “institutes the connection of generations,” it imposes violent
forms of partitions and exclusions: some genealogies are allowed, or even prescribed, others
are forbidden, destroyed, or repressed. Referring to my idea that the nation, constituting
itself as a political State, nevertheless (and contradictorily) models itself on the family in
order to define its internal order, she asserts that the nation, qua political institution, is
not neutral, but entirely sexed, relying on a structural division of statuses for men and
women, and, more than that, is an institution where the subjection of women forms the
model of every other discrimination (Ivekovic 31). This brings back and renews a
hypothesis that I had myself quickly enunciated in a different place: the “racist
community” and the “sexist community” (or the community of males excluding women)
are not really different, they are in fact the same “community,” or rely on the same
community-effect. However, such radical formulations – which I believe hit the right target
– leave some problems unclear. There remains a deep uncertainty concerning the
articulation of the nation-form and the institution of the family, or if you prefer the two
“orders,” public and private: is this an analogy, an extension, or an incorporation? And there
remains a difficulty to understand the political ambivalence of the effects produced by
concrete forms of articulation of sexual relations, race relations, or processes of
“racialization,” and the political institution. I am particularly thinking of highly
ambivalent forms of combination of racism and sexism, both on the side of the dominant
society, and the dominated or excluded groups, as were highlighted by the conflicts and
struggles in the “ethnic ghettoes,” such as the French Banlieues made famous by the 2005
uprisings. In resistances against racism and a racialized model of the nation, you witness
a volatile combination of movements of women’s liberation and movements for the
appropriation or re-appropriation of women by males and especially by young males, for
which the liberal republican state appears as a threat. We cannot ignore the ultra-violent
double-bind in which immigrants and children of migrants are taken, with, on one side, a
prohibited genealogy, and, on the other side, a stigma of origin or “ethnic-cultural descent” that
is imposed on them, so that the “normalization” of family life (which in general also
becomes increasingly problematic in today’s society) is made an impossible goal. Such
theoretical conversations and political dilemmas of the conjuncture prompted me to try
and return to the general issue, through the detour of reflecting on the “genealogical
scheme” itself, which seems to be at work and held in check in the vicissitudes of the
nation form.
Discursive models of the genealogical scheme
I had found the expression “genealogical scheme” used by Jacques Derrida, who uses it
in his book Politics of Friendship, when, particularly, he proposes a “deconstruction of the
This is from “Homo nationalis. An Anthropological Sketch of the Nation-Form,” in chapter 2 of
We, the People of Europe.
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concept of the political” (or the political model of democracy, inasmuch as in our
Western tradition it involves not only a reference to liberty and equality, but also to
“fraternity” or “brotherhood” among the citizens). This, he suggests, cannot take the
form of a “genealogy” of concepts, unless, reciprocally, the very notion of genealogy as a
critical operation of the intelligence becomes questioned:
At stake would thus be a deconstruction of the genealogical schema, a
paradoxical deconstruction – a deconstruction, at once genealogical and agenealogical, of the genealogical. It would concern, by way of a privilege granted
– thus its attribute – the genealogical. Wherever it commands in the name of birth,
of national naturalness which has never been what it was said to be. It would
concern confidence, credit, credence, doxa or eudoxia, opinion or right opinion,
the approbation given to filiation, at birth and at the origin, to generation, to
familiarity of the family, to the proximity of the neighbour – to what axioms too
quickly inscribe under these words. (105)
In the wake of this idea I want to try and see if I can use such a notion, “genealogical
schema” or “genealogical scheme,” in order to problematize the appearance, at the same
time massive and enigmatic, that the political in its modern, bourgeois, typical form
(namely the nation), does not so much eliminate the genealogies than displace and
generalize them. I want in particular to draw a somewhat fine line of demarcation
between the idea of a “genealogical scheme,” and such apparently very closely related
notions as a “genealogical principle” of the symbolic order (which, in France, has been
particularly emphasized by post-Lacanian thinkers who are also defending a traditional
notion of the law with psychoanalytic arguments, like Pierre Legendre). I think that what
is at stake primarily here is not so much a “symbolic order” whose foundations should
be looked for in a metapsychology of the unconscious origins of civilization, or a
metaphysics of right/law which transposes theological categories into democratic
representations of sovereignty, than it is made of material institutional structures (here I
draw on Foucault and Althusser as much as Derrida). However, these are structures
which, over a very long time (probably preceding and surviving the classical “nationstate”), perform a quasi-transcendental function, inasmuch as they make it possible to
articulate the individual, or the individuality of the subject, with a representation of the
genre, and the “generic” dimension of the “human” (note in passing, that all these terms:
the genre and the gender, the generic, the genetic, the genealogy and the genealogical,
share the same etymology: Latin genus and Greek genos, which is not to say that they all
say the same…). And while inscribing the individual in the horizon of the genre – which
you can consider as a universalistic operation – they also make it possible to articulate
identities with belongings and memberships (which can be exclusive or non-exclusive, just as
the articulation can be one of identification or one of rebellion and, simply,
distanciation). This correlative operation does not so much invoke a universalistic
horizon than it evokes a construction of the community, including a “community of
citizens,” which as we know was always the aporetic question that political philosophy
and political discourse in the West tried to resolve.
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With regret I do not embark here into the consideration of the many literary examples
without which I believe that, in fact, such conceptual riddles are definitely not to be
explored and understood. I will only refer to one example. There is barely no great
Western novel in the 19th and 20th centuries I believe, especially a great “realist” or
“modernist” novel, that is not concerned with the institutional and subjective issues of
genealogy, and so to speak its permanent crisis, or its inevitable “failure” in the possible
form of its more or less apparent triumph. Let me refer today only to Faulkner’s
Absalom, Absalom, published in 1936 in the middle of the New Deal Era. As you
remember, the “secret” reason for the murder which destroys the Sutpen’s estate and the
lives of the family, which we are explained (through the complex monologues of the
characters) is rooted in the traumatic actions both suffered and performed by the father,
and then carried over to his two sons, Henry and Charles, remains partially undecided. It
oscillates between two logics (or two “genea-logics,” if I may produce this barbarism),
that of misgenation, expressing a “code” of racial differences, and that of incest (since
Charles is the half brother of Judith and Henry, son to Henry Sutpen from a previous
marriage which he has broken when discovering that his wife was in fact “black,” i.e. had
inherited from her ancestors a racial stigma which in her son has become invisible, but
all the more inacceptable). Given Sutpen’s own conduct (which in the end leads to the
“degeneracy” of his “race”), it seems nevertheless likely that the “dogma,” so to speak,
whose observation leads to the catastrophe, is more on the side of racial misgenation
than of family incest, or even that the second is seen as a remedy against the first in a
delirant manner. It is this nexus that we can try and combine with the political question:
what does Faulkner’s novel illustrate? Is it the idea (postcolonial ante literam) that the
colonial situation (more precisely the situation of internal colonization of the American
South) anticipates a bourgeois order in which, ultimately, questions of degeneracy,
inherited defects, eugenics, will entirely invade problems of ancestry, descent, lineage,
thus making the progeny more decisive than the ancestors? Or is it Faulkner who, in an
allegoric manner, would have projected such typically bourgeois obsessions or fantasies
into a mythical colonial past, in order to have the individual tragedy symbolize the
collective one, the violent destruction of the colony itself during the Civil War appearing
as the backlash of its own internal violence? In any case, the novel also offers an
extraordinary treatment of the questions of articulation of “alliance” and “inheritance,”
and the way they are thrown into crisis when the “foreign body” par excellence, i.e. the
racial other who had remained invisible, emerges in the middle of the generational
connection.
The real work of investigation and problematization should indeed start now. I will
only indicate how I believe it could become oriented. A very long, perhaps infinite,
anthropological detour would be needed – this time using the name “anthropology” in
its disciplinary sense, i.e. submitting our use of anthropological work to the critical
supervision of the anthropologists themselves. And a no less substantial detour through
the history (the genealogy of the notion of “race” in its many contradictory uses
throughout modernity) would be equally necessary.
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“Post-colonial” studies and anthropology have completely transformed our
understanding of the way race and sex qua “differences” are articulated, and what kind
of power relations, discriminations, real and imaginary subjection, violent exclusion and
violent inclusion they support, in particular as it unravelled the traces that slavery and
imperialism have left in the post-colonial societies, and especially influenced the selfconsciousness or self-representation of nations which do not cease to perceive themselves as
embodying universal values in their constitutions. Many of the analyses here were carried
on by women anthropologists (I will give Ann Stoler’s work as an example – see Carnal
Knowledge and Imperial Power), but of course not only. There are however several points
which remain enigmatic in my view. There is a question in particular of what makes the
absolute specificity of slavery (and its social, affective, intellectual, political traces in
countries like the US, where the nexus of trauma and cultural productivity is especially
visible), within the general framework of colonization and empire. Conversely, this is the
question of why we cannot read the history of colonization as a secular geopolitical
phenomenon as a simple extension or pushing to the extreme of the phenomenon of
slavery, especially chattel slavery, even if we agree that colonization and empire are the
framework inside which modern slavery is justified and expands. This is in particular
where such analyses as those of Claude Meillassoux in his Anthropology of Slavery appear to
me especially valuable, because he would particularly insist on the importance of the
genealogical interruption in the process of production of slaves. Slaves violently uprooted
from Africa and transported to America have neither ancestors nor progeny, except the
“products” of the operations of reproduction compared to that of domestic animals, or
the “effects” of the sexual pleasure that the white masters take with their female slaves. I
tend to believe – but this is only a hypothesis, not even a hypothesis, a simple guess –
that the phenomenology of the presence of the “foreign body,” the intruder in the
middle of the bourgeois order, whose essential manifestation is the racialized body in
terms of colour, derives not so much from a coherence of the sexual and racial dimensions,
either formulated in biological or cultural languages, than from the invisible disruption or
interruption within the genealogical scheme that slavery in particular has pushed to the
extreme and installed in the very heart of the collective memory of our institutions.
There would be indeed many other aspects of the transition from colonial societies, with
their complex regimes of racial and sexual domination, to the so-called “hybrid” societies
of the former metropolises, where the competition among men for the control, the uses,
the services of women, is never to be observed independent of racial and/or cultural
characterizations of the subjects, both among the dominant and the dominated, the rich
and the poor, to try and decide where the genealogical scheme is operating and how it
becomes intrumentalized in the very moment when its continuity, its social function, its
legitimacy are increasingly difficult to ascertain.
Now the form in which the genealogical scheme was purified and emphasized in
Western history was certainly above all its inventing and progressive generalizing the
notion of “race” between the 16th and the 20th century, before it was officially
disqualified by scientific and political institutions speaking in the name of the universal –
perhaps only to continue a subterranean life under different names (such as cultural
tradition or membership), and, more interestingly, becoming vindicated by individuals
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and groups stigmatized as cultural or ethnic others who insist not on the elimination of
the name “race,” but rather on its performative reversal (for which the famous “black is
beautiful” remains emblematic), because they don’t want the problem of hereditary
exclusion, generation after generation, father to son and mother to daughter, to become
cancelled and occulted with the name that, originally, made the exclusion possible and
even legitimate. This is why I also believe that we should continue to study the
immensely complex history or genealogy of the category “race,” and all its metonymies
(blood, colour, drives, etc.), and develop our understanding of the functions that it has
performed. Some of these functions are crucially cognitive or if you like epistemological, i.e.
they have to do with the frameworks that were available for the humans to understand
the organization of their own species, indeed always in the form of a knowledge that is
inseparable from power relations. This remains very much the case today (which is
perhaps one of the reasons why such substitutes of “racial relations” as
“multiculturalism” are a permanent stake in scientific debates as they are indeed in
political conflicts). A naturalistic paradigm of the understanding of the history, diversity,
separation and hybridation of social groups has been replaced tendencially by a
sociological and cultural paradigm, which does not produce the same effects of
recognition and misrecognition, I am not claiming that, but which must also combine a
representation of the spatial and territorial distribution of the human, with an integration
of the diversity into a single history, or a single time, which the West has mainly
imagined as linear progress, but which we are learning now to imagine and conceptualize
in more complex, less polarized manners…. However, some of these functions are also
linked to the question of understanding how anthropological hierarchies are inherited, or
transferred from one generation to the other, and how these mechanisms of transference have
been linked with “reproductive” institutions, and finally how they have become
progressively altered in the processes of colonization and decolonization. It seems to me
that the vicissitudes of the category “race” are a good guiding thread to enter into the
field of theses complex transformations. In a recurrent manner, the question has been
asked whether there exists really something like a “racism without races,” and in which
sense: whether it is a racism or a symptom of the “declining significance of race,” to
quote a well-known American sociologist? Which relations it has with the various forms
of “identity politics,” which clearly are not distributed only on one side of the existent,
essentially capitalist, relations of power? How it could be possible to combine a
universalistic critique of stigmatization and a critique of the homogenising functions of
the anti-genealogical discourse of right and citizenship?
Perhaps we could simply suggest the following: in a first time, what seems to be the
case is that genealogical notions (included in the form of the idea of cultural legacy,
inherited identity), and more generally the genealogical scheme, which covers the whole
range of notions from genetics to heritage or patrimony, when it is used for identifying
communities or collectives, is the remainder of the idea of “race” after its application to
the violent discrimination of colonial subjects, or descendants of slaves, or ethnic others,
has been delegitimized. This is especially visible when, for example, returning to the
example of the social and cultural conflicts in the modern ghettoes like the French
Banlieues that I mentioned in the beginning, a quality like “migrant” (which is in fact a
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stigma and a pejorative collective name) becomes absurdly attributed to youngsters who,
because precisely they are discriminated, are seen as a threat, but who are only the
children or the grand-children of the actual migrants, therefore enjoy the national
citizenship for most of them, so that the quality “migrant” becomes socially and symbolically
a “hereditary” quality. We can see here the continuation of the representation of quasi- or
pseudo- collective genealogy, that I referred to as a community-effect. It shows that the
community as such can not become universalised, or it has to exclude its others from the
universal itself. But, if we take a second look at this absurd mechanism, we can also
understand that in a sense the name race, whatever the biological justifications that were
found for it, deriving from the transformation of natural history and evolutionary
biology into what my master Canguilhem called a “scientific ideology,” was never
anything else than a myth, more precisely a mythical construction allowing it to imagine
that reproduction, transmission, education, memory, tradition, etc., are taking place within
the limits of a community which bears a certain recognizable “identity.” Indeed this myth
was anything but deprived of effectivity, which is the characteristic of all genuine
mythical constructions: it was applied and “forced” into reality, so to speak. With this
idea, we can finally return to the idea that there is an intrinsic link between racism and
sexism that the modern nation, not only does not suppress, but permanently reinforces,
while it is bound in the end to produce permanent crises in its institutional life. The
concept of “race” does indeed immediately exhibit the sexed character of every social
mechanism of transmission of “properties” or “capacities” from one generation to the
other, and it illustrates in a sense the powerful fantasy of reproduction as an iteration of the
same, for which paradoxically you need at least two individuals, who are always already
dissimilar, which in turn leads to all sorts of practical and imaginary methods to prevent
reproduction from generating otherness (Indeed I have in mind here Philomena Essed’s
extraordinary notion and investigation of what she calls “preference for sameness” as a
rationale of “everyday racism”). But this “pragmatic” concept of race, also possibly
transferred to culture with the genealogical scheme itself, calls probably for more, which
we know has murderous effects: namely the idea that nations, or groups of nations
sharing what is sometimes called a “civilization” should be considered as endogamic
communities, where reproduction is “normally” organized as a redoubled alliance of its
own members. As we know, this was never the case, neither in the colonies nor in the
metropolises and it is less than ever the case today, in spite of all the powerful
mechanism of resistance both on the side of the dominant and the dominated communities within
our “globalized” societies. So reproduction was always governed not by the application
but by the transgression of its own “law.” What existed was not “endogamy,” it was
“pseudo-endogamy.” But pseudo-endogamy is not the same as random or generalized
hybridation. As the ideals of “post-racial” societies, “multicultural” communities, and
“diasporic territories” become increasingly influential at the political level, it is
imaginable – other social factors being indeed taken into account – that the genealogical
scheme will be increasingly disrupted, or if you like practically deconstructed. I hardly
believe that it will be entirely dispensed of, even in its transgressive or provocative uses,
as long as no other notions are to be found to articulate collective history and individual
reproduction….
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Works Cited
Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities.
London: Verso, 1991.
Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004.
Canguilhem, Georges. Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences. Trans. Arthur
Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
Essed, Philomena. “Cloning Cultures: The Social Injustices of Sameness.” Ethnic and
Racial Studies 25.6 (November 2002): 1066–1082.
Ivekovic, Rada. Le Sexe de la Nation. Paris: Léo Scheer, 2003.
Legendre, Pierre, ed. L'Inestimable Objet de la transmission. Étude sur le principe généalogique en
Occident, éd. Paris: Fayard, 1985, 2004.
Meillassoux, Claude. The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold. London:
Athlone Press, 1991.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule.
2nd Revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Weinbaum, Alys Eve. Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic
Modern Thought. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Wilson, William Julius. Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
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